COBWEB Project

Citizens’ Science and Smart Cities Summit, JRC, Ispra, Italy.

5th Feb, 2014

Chris Higgins Project Coordinator

chris.higgins@ed.ac.uk

http://cobwebproject.eu/

The brief…

• Explore the interoperability and reusability of data across citizen-centred projects (technical, organizational, legal perspectives),

• The relationships between Smart Cities and Citizen-centred projects,

• The interoperability with official data infrastructures, such as the Infrastructure for Spatial Information in Europe (INSPIRE) of which JRC is the technical coordinator.

Citizen Observatory Web

• 4 year research project

• Crowdsourced environmental data to aid decision making

• Introduce quality measures and reduce uncertainty

• Combine crowdsourced data with existing sources of data

Project Partners

Essential context – WNBR

• UNESCO Man and Biosphere Programmes World Network of Biosphere Reserves (WNBR) – Sites of excellence to foster harmonious integration

of people and nature for sustainable development through participation, knowledge sharing, poverty reduction and human well-being improvements, cultural values and society's ability to cope with change, thus contributing to the Millennium Development Goals

• 610 reserves in 117 countries • Seville criteria means modern reserves have to

encompass significant human populations in order to get designated

COBWEB Biosphere Reserves

• Germany: Wadden See and Hallig Islands • Greece: Mount Olympus & Gorge of Samaria • Left open possibility of expansion to further BRs

later in project

UK (Wales): Biosffer Dyfi – Development work

concentrated here

What are we going to build?

A number of demonstrator mobile phone applications

– Exactly what, deliberately left open and subject to discussion with stakeholders

3 pilot case study areas: 1. Validating earth

observation products 2. Biological monitoring 3. Flooding

Making data available through GEOSS

• Data will be available via OGC Web Services, eg, WFS, WMS, SOS

• Discoverable via CSW • Will continue working within the context

of the Architecture Implementation Pilots

GEOSS Architecture Implementation Pilots (AIP)

• One of the means by which GEOSS addresses interoperability issues and GEOSS Common Infrastructure extension work

• Led by the OGC • All contributions are in-kind • Phased approach • AIP-7 being planned now

Technology that could be reused

• “Data collected should be made available through the GEOSS without any restrictions”

• But, we must address “questions of privacy…”

• In AIP-6 we piloted the use of access management federations

WP5: Privacy assurance, access management

• COBWEB about environmental, not personal data

• Some kinds of protected data that may be encountered during the project: – Personal information, eg, name, email address – Location protected species – Reference data from European National Mapping

and Cadastral Agencies, eg, INSPIRE Network Services

– Conflated data

From the European Interoperability Framework for Pan-European eGovernment Services (http://ec.europa.eu/idabc/servlets/Docb0db.pdf?id=31597)

Dimensions of Interoperability

Where we are in the project…

• Month 16 of 48 – still some flexibility • November 2013: Milestone 2:

– End of design and initial stakeholder engagement phase. Start implementing platform

• November 2014: Milestone 3: – First Welsh demonstrator completed and

ready for testing in the field

chris.higgins@ed.ac.uk